It’s worth clarifying here that these metrics do not affect your ad’s performance in the auction. If you’re familiar with Google Ads, their Quality Score metric does directly correlate with an increased or decreased cost per click. That is not the case here. Rather, these metrics should be used to inform decisions on your landing page experience, ad copy, creatives, audience targeting, etc.

All three metrics will be given one of these possible values:

Above average

Average

Below average (bottom 35% of ads)

Below average (bottom 20% of ads)

Below average (bottom 10% of ads)

The scores are given in relation to other ads that are competing for the same audience targeting. Average means between 35% & 55%, for reference.

Effectively, we’re talking about encouraging people to engage / take actions in a way that Facebook deems to be forced or unnatural.

If you have a low quality ranking, you might consider quite simply reviewing your strategy, ad copy, and creative. The key phrase to think about here is authenticity. If you’re trying to drive engagement in some way, you need to do it in such a way that Facebook deems authentic. Check out this post from 2016 on Newsfeed Values to gain a better understanding.

Engagement Rate Ranking

Engagements can refer to clicks, reactions, comments, shares, and extra actions such as clicking ‘see more’. You’ll notice already that we need to be striking a balance between this, and avoiding engagement bait, which will damage your quality score.

If you find yourself with a campaign having low engagement rate ranking, similar advice applies here as before with quality ranking. You’ll need to think about how relevant your copy & creative is to that particular audience. If people aren’t engaging, it may be that you just aren’t saying anything interesting. Or, perhaps, that message/image doesn’t resonate as well with that particular audience.

Conversion Rate Ranking

Facebook’s definition: “How your ad’s expected conversion rate compared with ads that had the same optimisation goal and competed for the same audience.”

This metric is comparing your ad with other ads that are not only targeting the same audiences, but also using the same optimisation goal. An optimisation goal could be anything from a purchase, to a lead form, a 10 second video view, a Messenger conversation, etc.

Depending on what your goal is here, you might not want to pay too much attention to this score. If you have a higher value product or service, you’ll naturally get a lower conversion rate ranking. And remember, this score doesn’t impact the auction; it is purely feedback for you as an advertiser. So if the campaign is running profitably despite a low conversion rate ranking, don’t lose sleep over it.